PARIS: Humanity has less than three years to halt the rise of planet-warming carbon emissions and less than a decade to slash them almost in half, the UN said Monday in a landmark report on stopping global warming and ensuring a “liveable future”.
That daunting task is still — and only just — possible, but current policies are leading the planet towards catastrophic temperature rises, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made clear.
The world’s nations, they said, are taking our future right to the wire.
The 2,800-page report — by far the most comprehensive assessment of how to halt global heating ever produced — documents to “a litany of broken climate promises”, said UN chief Antonio Guterres in a blistering judgement of governments and industry.
“Some government and business leaders are saying one thing — but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic,” Guterres said in a video message released at the same time as the UN report.
World ‘sleepwalking’ to climate catastrophe: UN chief
In recent months, the IPCC has published the first two instalments in a trilogy of mammoth scientific assessments covering how greenhouse gas emissions are heating the planet and what that means for life on Earth.
This third report outlines what we can do about it.
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